Long overlooked in Proust's posthumously published writings, Chardin
and Rembrandt, written when he was only twenty-four years old, not only
reemphasizes the importance of visual art to his development, but
contains the seeds of his later work.
Proposed in 1895 by Proust to the newspaper Revue hebdomadaire (it was
rejected), this essay is much more than a straightforward piece of art
criticism. It is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator
gives advice to a young man suffering from melancholy, taking him on an
imaginary tour through the Louvre where his readings of Chardin imbue
the everyday world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt
take his melancholic pupil beyond the realm of mere objects.
Published for the first time as a stand-alone volume and newly
translated, this edition, part of the David Zwirner Books ekphrasis
series, aims to introduce a wider audience to one of Proust's most
important and influential works in Western literature. "For the true
artist," as Proust writes, "as for the natural scientist, every type
is interesting, and even the smallest muscle has its importance." The
same could be said of the author's own work--every essay has its own
crucial place in the formation of his groundbreaking oeuvre.
The afterword by renowned Proust scholar Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat,
originally published in the French by Le Bruit du Temps, is an
impassioned argument in favor of returning to the lost paths of Proust's
early thinking. It sees, in the passage from Chardin's world of objects
to Rembrandt's contemplative paintings, a movement toward the radical
interiority for which Proust would later become widely celebrated as a
novelist. Written at the beginning of his literary career, Chardin and
Rembrandt gestures back to some of Proust's earliest notes on art,
while creating space for what was to come.
